Life is sometimes great, Life is sometimes awful... but Life is always funny if you look at it just right.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Does This Pencil Have Spell Check?

My sweet niece mailed me a hand-written letter on Monday. It was carefully crafted on flowered stationary, her perfect handwriting showing the time she spent on it. Wanting to return the gesture, I decided to respond in kind. I shuffled through my house for stationary, finding none. I wanted to stay away from the computer since it lacked the personal touch she had extended to me, but I found myself searching online templates so I could at least have something other than a 8 ½ x 11 sheet of blank white paper to write on. I downloaded a flowered border, thankful it printed light lines for me to write on. I haven’t actually used a pen to write a letter in years, so I’m a bit out of practice at keeping straight lines.

I started writing the letter, trying to remember the format since I didn’t have Word to help me cheat. When I finally figured that out, I began to write… then quickly had to toss it out since mistakes in pen must be corrected with scribbles.

There were just too many scribbles to be considered respectable…especially coming from an ‘adult’.

So I started fresh… with a pencil.

I wrote away, talking about Cash, the dogs, etc. Pausing for a moment to review my work, I noticed there were some misspellings. I don’t think I even own a hard copy of the dictionary so I found myself typing certain difficult words in Word, letting it correct my atrocious (a word I CANNOT spell without help) spelling.

I then realized my young niece (turns out, a word I often misspell ‘neice’…and I can’t even spell ‘misspell’ without help) had likely written the letter without computer assistance…which only made me feel like a bigger idiot.

I looked at the letter and realized I had interchanged ‘their’ and ‘there’. Sigh. I’m lost without my green grammar squiggles (great, just discovered I can’t spell ‘grammar’ or ‘squiggles’ without help either).

Really, it was so nice to receive the letter, but…

I didn’t need it pointed out that I’m a buffoon without my computer holding my hand AND…

That my 10 year old niece is 100 times brighter than me.

*Note* Argh! And according to the green squiggles, it’s stationEry, not stationAry. Paper, not an exercise bicycle.